Lauren Feiner

“The line between professional and personal is increasingly blurred,” says a LinkedIn document shown in a video deposition. Then-LinkedIn product executive Kumaresh Pattabiraman explains in the video that in the wake of the pandemic, “we observe that people are bringing their personal and their professional lives a lot closer together,” with people posting about everything from completing a marathon to their views on politics on LinkedIn. This seems to undermine the FTC’s claim that LinkedIn does not compete with Facebook and Instagram for personal social networking. He says friends and family have always been part of the LinkedIn experience, but even more so now.

In a video deposition Judge Boasberg watched a few weeks ago and the media is now being shown, former Morgan Stanley investment banker Ali Esfahani describes the whirlwind few days in which the $19 billion deal came together. The deal followed none of the usual steps Morgan Stanley would typically take contacting buyers and negotiating price on the company’s behalf, he says. Instead, after being called on a Saturday night, he showed up to a meeting to hammer out the deal, but “when we arrived, we realized the price had already been negotiated, the buyer had already been selected.” Esfahani says he felt like he was basically “being thrown a bone because of all the preemptive work that we had done.”

After six weeks, the FTC’s anti-monopoly trial against Meta is finally over. The parties will need to file post-trial briefs, including Meta’s argument to strike FTC expert Hemphill’s testimony, and then it will be up to Judge Boasberg to write his opinion. Boasberg says he plans to “take a welcome respite from thinking about this” until the first brief is due. He thanks everyone for their “hard work over the last four and a half years” — a stark reminder of how long this case has been in the works — and adds that the “issues are certainly interesting, and I’ll await final submissions and get you my decision as expeditiously as I can.”

The company plans to move to strike Hemphill’s testimony, saying he prejudged Meta’s antitrust liability even before he was retained as an expert witness by the FTC. Huff pulls up a more full version of the 2019 presentation that Hemphill and former Biden official Tim Wu gave to the agency urging an investigation into Meta’s potential monopoly power, just a week before it opened its probe. Huff suggests that the agency ultimately took Hemphill’s litigation strategy advice, though the expert disagrees that’s what he offered. Huff shows a slide suggesting the FTC interview many of the witnesses that appeared in this case, including the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp. Hemphill says “it’s hardly brain surgery to talk to all the founders.” Huff also pulls up a post Hemphill and Wu wrote after the FTC filed its case, calling Meta a monopolist.

When lower engagement correlates with users being served more ads, Meta suggests that might actually mean that users like the ads so much that they’re clicking them and spending their time on the advertiser’s site — not that they dislike ads so much that they leave. Hemphill concedes that he didn’t parse out how much of the decreased engagement was due to people liking or disliking ads, but says the distinction doesn’t seem important.

On cross examination, Meta attorney Kevin Huff pushes back on Hemphill’s argument that temporary changes in user behavior around an outage should not get much weight, in part because businesses don’t make decisions based on such a blip. He shows an excerpt of Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony, where he said Meta observed an increase in time spent on its platforms during a 2013 YouTube outage, and as a result invested in building out video products like Facebook Live, at one point investing a billion dollars a year on content.

The FTC has argued that Meta paid a premium for WhatsApp beyond its market value, which it was willing to do squelch a potential competitor. But Boasberg asks Hemphill to reconcile how that could be the case for Instagram as well, whose $1 billion price tag now looks quite low given its explosive growth and money-making ability. Hemphill says the price needs to be analyzed within the context of 2012. But the judge still wonders, “why can’t you think about it that Mark Zuckerberg is really smart,” and saw value where others didn’t?